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Pakistan Issues Rare Response to Western Media Story on Nukes

January 11, 2009 11:51 AM

ABC News' Nick Schifrin reports:

It was almost exactly a year ago that a bus provided by Pakistan’s interior ministry drove a group of foreign reporters to the perfectly manicured lawns of Interservices Public Relations, or ISPR, the Pakistan military’s PR arm, to meet a well-spoken retired lieutenant general.

His name was Khalid Kidwai, and he was -- and still is -- responsible for securing the nuclear labs, weapons and research of the only Muslim country in the world with the Bomb.

Over two hours he took the 60 or so people in the room through a long PowerPoint presentation, laying out why, in his words, Pakistan’s nuclear weapon security was “foolproof.”

He told us it was “irresponsible” and “inaccurate” to say otherwise -- just a couple days after IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei warned out loud that "nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of extremist groups in Pakistan or Afghanistan."

ElBaradei, Kidwai told us, had "no business to talk like that. If you open and shoot your mouth without any information -- that is very bad."

This weekend, about 330 days after Kidwai’s briefing, Pakistan’s foreign ministry released a rare, White House-esque denial to a must-read New York Times Magazine article that features Kidwai prominently.

In the article, chief Washington correspondent David Sanger imagines a Pakistan that cannot control its own nuclear weapons. Sanger quotes an unnamed, senior U.S. administration official as saying the Bush administration has been worried about “steadfast efforts of different extremist groups to infiltrate [Pakistan’s nuclear] labs and put sleepers and so on in there.”

Sanger continues: “After more than four years, no one in Washington has a clear sense of whether the small, covert American program to help Pakistan secure its weapons and laboratories is actually working. Kidwai has been happy to take the cash and send in progress reports, but auditors from Washington have been rebuffed whenever they have asked to see how, exactly, the money was being spent.”

And more: “If a real-life crisis broke out, it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan’s weapons were -- or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists. ‘It’s worse than that,’ the participant in the [table-top] simulations [of Pakistan losing a nuclear weapon] told me. ‘We can’t even certify exactly how many weapons the Pakistanis have -- which makes it difficult to sound convincing that there’s nothing to worry about.’”

It’s exceptional -- if not unprecedented -- for Pakistan’s foreign ministry to single out a Western article. The statement called Sanger’s work, which is actually an excerpt from his upcoming book, “most unfortunate and contrary to the facts,” especially “at this juncture when the new administration is about to take office.”

But read it closely and you’ll realize the statement is not harsh at all and doesn’t deny any point in the article. “We are prepared to continue to working closely with the international community on arms control and disarmament issues and engage with the US and other nuclear weapon states with a view to enhancing mutual trust and confidence in relevant domains, including prevention of risks of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, on an equitable and non-discriminatory basis,” the statement concludes.

For those still reading, there is an amazing tale in Sanger’s article unrelated to nuclear weapons.

He writes that when Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani visited the White House last summer, he happily presented President Bush with a “gift”: evidence that the Pakistani military had recently raided a madrasa run by legendary jihadi/current militant commander Jalaluddin Haqqani. What Gilani didn’t know -- and perhaps didn’t know until he read Sanger’s article -- was that Bush and company knew that two days before the “raid” the Pakistani military had warned the Haqqanis. “It was something like, ‘Hey, we’re going to hit your place in a few days, so if anyone important is there, you might want to tell them to scram,’” Sanger quotes an unnamed official describing the warning.

No wonder the White House doesn’t trust the Pakistani government.

January 11, 2009 in Nick Schifrin | Permalink | User Comments (1)

User Comments

Posted by: Dr.Shahid | Jan 11, 2009 5:15:21 PM

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